When sausage products are formed, the sausage material is stuffed into a casing and metal clips are applied to the casing at selected intervals to form sausage sticks of predetermined lengths. After the sausage sticks have been completely processed, the metal clips are removed to permit vacuum packaging of the product. If the clips were to remain on the sausage sticks, the plastic wrapping could be punctured in the vacuum packing operation.
Heretofore, the clips have been removed by manually cutting or shearing the clips from the sausage stick. When the clips are removed by cutting or shearing, the ends of the casing are frazzled, thereby resulting in an unattractive package. Furthermore, this manual clip removal operation is labor intensive and is, therefore, very costly.